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Archive for April, 2008

Maybe I didn’t love you
Quite as often as I could have
And maybe I didn’t treat you
Quite as good as I should have

~

If I made you feel second best
Girl I’m sorry I was blind
You were always on my mind
You were always on my mind

~

And maybe I didn’t hold you
All those lonely.. lonely times
And I guess I never told you
I’m so happy that you’re mine

~

Little things I should have said and done
I just never took the time
You were always on my mind
You were always on my mind

~

Tell me..
Tell me that your sweet love hasn’t died
Give me..
Give me one more chance to keep you satisfied
I’ll keep you satisfied

~

Little things I should have said and done
I just never took the time
You were always on my mind
You were always on my mind
You were always on my mind..

~

The one and only
Willie Nelson

Happy Birthday, Willie

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Willie Nelson, one of the greatest living Texans, turns 75 today. Wherever sons and daughters of the Lone Star state find themselves today, let them lift their ice-cold longnecks high in honor of the gentleman from Abbott.

In a state that has produced more than its share of legendary American musicians, perhaps no Texan is as artistically consequential as Willie Hugh Nelson, whose grandmother taught him to play the guitar.

Beyond his peerless artistic legacy to the state and the nation, there is Willie’s status as a cultural icon – indeed, the iconic Texan of our time, beloved by all. Despite his eccentric political opinions, his tax problems and his marijuana busts, if you harbor hardness in your heart towards Willie Nelson, that says more about you than it does Willie.

Willie Nelson is like Louis Armstrong, a deeply American artist whose simplicity, decency and generosity of spirit, conveyed in a voice as clear and sweet as branch water, illuminates the finer parts of our common humanity. Speaking in the current issue of Texas Monthly, Austin singer-songwriter Bobby Earl Smith has this to say about Red-Headed Stranger, Willie’s visionary breakthrough 1975 album that assured his place in music history: “It’s got that mysterious quality that you kind of feel the meaning of more than you can say what it’s all about.”

What’s true of the songs is true of the singer. It’s hard to say what Willie Nelson is about, but it’s easy to say this: Willie Nelson is Texas. With his old, battered heart and Trigger, his old, battered guitar, he makes us all – rednecks, hippies and the whole Lone Star lot – proud to be from here. Good Texans honor Willie Nelson on this milestone because he has honored them with his music and with his life.

The Dallas Morning News

Nikon D70s

Doug was my father’s older brother by five years. He was killed in France in 1944. It fell to me to be the keeper of the few artifacts of his life: these spurs, his pocket watch, dog tags, casket flag and Purple Heart. Also, my middle name, Douglas, was from him. Doug was in a unit that was guarding Patton’s supply line during the Battle of the Bulge. The Nazis tried to break out to the south and cut Patton’s lines of supply, but failed. Doug was killed in that battle. The first my grandmother knew of his death was that the birthday card she sent him was returned with “deceased” rubber stamped on it. It reached her before the War Department’s telegram. War is not kind.

Doug died eight years before I was born so I never knew him, but I always felt a bit haunted by him. I had his name, and my grandmother would slip and call me “Doug” at times. I think this was part of her grief process. She never really got over his death. My father was a Marine medical corpsman. He was on the boats headed to Iwo Jima and he would have hit the beach on the first wave. My grandmother had him pulled off the boat on the “sole surviving heir” rule established after the Sullivan brothers were killed. This infuriated my father, but probably saved his life. Odds are that I wouldn’t be here had Doug not died.

It is strange when someone you have never met has such a powerful impact on your life that you feel as if you knew him. And, I am probably the last person on Earth who has any feeling for the reality of his life. He lives only in my meta-memories now. When I stop remembering him, he will be gone. I hope I don’t haunt anyone who hasn’t been born yet, but then I don’t have to. I have a family that I love and friends who I cherish. Doug didn’t get a chance for that. I’m all he has.

Nikon F3, T-Max 400 film, Zoom-Nikkor 35-105 lens

This is Alex’s engine. It’s all that’s left of his Nissan 240 SX which he destroyed by driving through a fence. He salvaged the engine and works on it in my garage almost every weekend. The plan is to rebuild it with custom high-performance enhancements and to find a body to go around it.

I get a kick out of watching him work on this thing because he is so completely devoted to it. It’s important when your kids latch onto something and it really becomes a passion for them. Those things often become the guiding stars of our lives.

This is the first real black and white photograph that I have made in a very long time, part of my exploration of the soon-to-be archaic art of film photography. Is this photograph any better because it is done on black and white film? I don’t know for sure, but I do know that when you know you are shooting in black and white, you look more closely at things like light, form and texture. Color can be a distraction under certain circumstances.

I can’t find my old film processing equipment, and I’m going to have to buy more if I want to keep doing this. This roll was the last black and white film processed by the last film lab operating in Louisville. They aren’t going to develop any more b&w film. The local camera shop now has to ship b&w film to someplace in Pennsylvania and it takes three weeks to turn around. But I really should be developing the film myself anyway. It’s easy and only takes a few minutes, and you get the development you want rather than what some bored kid at lab wants to do.

The thing I’m finding is that I just love working with the old F3. I have several exquisite Nikon manual focus lenses. Each lens has a somewhat different character, slightly different color balance, different focusing characteristics. They each produce their own distinct effect in a picture, effects that are often more pleasing than the razor-sharp computer-driven accuracy of the digital auto-focus lenses. The digital is still the go-to ax for the bread and butter work, but I’m liking working with film again.

Nikon D70s

I like farms. I have never lived or worked on one, but that’s just because my life didn’t take me in that direction, not because I didn’t like them. I was up in Indiana, in what used to be a rural area, and saw this scene. I had to stop the car and shoot it: a beautiful old farm sliced up and sold off to build more suburban sprawl. While food prices double and triple, our destruction of farms keeps pace. I know people need a place to live, but we also need food and fresh air.

America seems to be very short-sighted right now. We kill off our farms and ship our jobs overseas so that we can buy cheap crap at Wal-Mart. Where do you think that takes us? It isn’t to greater prosperity and security; I can tell you that. If I had a bunch of money, I would be buying farm land and I wouldn’t be dividing it up for subdivisions and strip malls. I have yet to see a strip mall I couldn’t live without.

Nikon D70s

I wish I could say that this one was shot on black & white film and hand printed on archival paper with sepia toner, but it wasn’t. It is a digital image that has been Photoshopped. (Yes, like “Google” “Photoshop” has become a verb in some circles. That’s how you know you have arrived in the technocracy — your name is made into a verb.)

These cows are Black Angus. They were particularly annoyed at me because they were expecting that I would feed them, but all I did was take their picture. Rude of me, I have to admit. We were up there shooting pasture and grazing pictures for a brochure. The cows gathered at the fence staring and mooing impatiently. It made me wish I had a bag of feed for them.

When you take a photograph, you capture a discrete moment in time. Especially with the photograph of a person, they have never looked exactly that way before nor will they again. They will change, but the photo won’t. “Immortality” is too grand a word to apply here, but there is a little hint of it in the way the photograph frees the image in time. Within the photograph, change stops but the image can continue to move forward in time. I have been thinking about the nexus of photographer and subject, time and place, feeling and technology that makes the photographic moment.

The photographic moment implies a decision. Certainly, most photos are shot randomly. The only decision involved is that we want to get a picture of Aunt Dorothy. Real photographs usually have some kind of intentionality about them. There is a decision to make a particular photo in this distinctive light of this unique subject. The photographic moment implies relationships and judgments. There is intent to portray this subject in a particular way and this reveals feelings and thoughts on the part of the photographer. A wealth of messages will come across to us when we view an intentional photograph: the photographer’s feelings about the subject, perhaps the subject’s attitude toward the photographer, and the reason this image is chosen to bring to our attention out of the many that were shot.

The photographic moment involves chaos. There are some commercial photographers who are so damned good and so practiced that they basically know what they will get before they trip the shutter, but even they review their shots before they release them to the world. For most of us there is an element of chaos and uncertainty when we trip the shutter, and we don’t completely know what we have captured until we look at the pictures. Part of the fun of photography is when the camera surprises you and you end up getting a better or more interesting shot than you thought you were getting. Sometimes the camera sees things that the photographer does not, and on rare occasions, it can make you look like a genius when you know it was just an accident. In these situations, take your bow and keep your mouth shut. The opposite is also true: at times we think we are brilliant, but a review of the shots disappoints.

The photographic moment happens in a place. You can’t shoot a picture in the abstract world of ideas. It has to happen somewhere, even if it is a studio with a completely contrived setting. When then picture is shot, it is shot somewhere. In that moment, it captures the ambience of the location. You can sit in Atlanta and write a story about St. Louis, but if you want a photograph of St. Louis, you have to go there. The photographic moment happens in a particular place. Those who study people will always remind us of how much we are shaped by the place where we live. A similar effect acts upon photographs. The atmosphere, light, terrain, architecture and people of the location where we make our picture all have an affect on the photograph and leave their mark in it.

The photographer responds to something – a ray of light, a face rich with character, a striking incongruity, a feeling. The photographer aims the camera and trips the shutter. A moment which will never be repeated is captured in a unique and specific place. It is all recorded in a single still image. From this moment, the image will move all over the world and lasts for an unknown period of time. The taking of a picture is a very powerful act when you think about it. Of course, it’s probably better not to think about it too much, because over-thinking can bring on a paralyzing self-consciousness. So, forget everything I’ve said. Feel something, aim the camera and shoot the picture.

 
Nikon FM, Kodak Plus-X 100 ASA

This is one of the most cosmic places in all of Kentucky. It’s the Shaker village at Pleasant Hill. The Shakers were a religious group who believed that the end of the world was coming soon. They built communities which were beautiful and austere where they lived lives of celibacy and devotion. The interesting thing is that the men and women got together for ecstatic dances, and some of their spirit-filled movements gave them their name, Shakers. But there was no sex. They danced, but no romance was allowed. The Shaker communities were like co-ed monasteries. Predictably, they died off. Their buildings are still here, and we’re still here, but the Shakers are gone.

2008, Nikon F3 and Elite Chrome 200